Workshop

Life Tree Training provides an introductory workshop which aims to teach you how to Activate, Nurture and Live the 21 scientifically supported principles associated with the 7 habits of maintaining a healthy brain and a happy life.

This is a full day workshop run in a country hotel with easy access from London.

It is highly recommended that you start with this workshop.

Video Episodes

To support you in your development and to help you establish the 7 habits into your life, video episodes are available. The aim of these is to take you through some of the principles and the activities which move you towards establishing these behaviours in your life. Episodes feature ideas and guests who have specific expertise in the area being considered.

Newsletter

Ongoing information is available via the Newsletter, FaceBook and Twitter. Sign up on the site.

App Coach

This was designed to enable you to have the programme in your pocket at all times. With, of course, the added bonus of being able to set reminders in your calendar with alarms to prompt you.

Research database

This is available to testimonials and consists of the scientific research behind the programme. An extensive search of the published research was conducted and it is from this that the 21 principles were established. Reading this literature can be inspiring to keep you on track and motivated in your programme.

Web-based coach

This was designed to enable you to have a coach for this programme available on your computer.

Helpful Attitudes

There are some attitudes that will help you in your programme. These consist of the following:

• Be Adventure Minded, and Acknowledge that the Journey is the End in itself.
• Being open minded is a good start, but still somewhat passive; being adventure minded involves developing an excitement for life as a great exploration. This exploration is concerned with finding out what works for us in our particular situation at this time in our life. The adventure will not always go smoothly – there will be blissful times of great beauty to contrast with times of despair and hurt, and plenty of places in between these extremes. However, it is neither the highs, nor lows, nor the in between places that are important in this spirit of exploration – but rather the joy of being on an adventure at all.
  
• Let the journey unfold and progress organically, with joys and happiness as your guides. Evolution not Revolution.
• This attitude follows on quite naturally from the previous one in the sense that if you are enjoying the adventure or journey itself, then you will not be in a hurry to get somewhere else all of the time (note that there will be times when you need to be in a hurry to get somewhere else – the point is that we don’t need to act like this all of the time).
• You will also be intrigued to watch things as they unravel, or ravel, before you, and will be more inclined to flow with life rather than push against it.
• The key here is the second part of the statement – ‘with joys and happiness as your guides’. If you truly take pleasure in watching your life unfold before you then the joy and pleasure will happen spontaneously. Don’t try to get somewhere else or be someone that you are not, be present HERE and NOW! You should not be trying to uproot your life (revolution), but rather witness it evolving – and that means the good and the bad together!
• The point of this attitude is that we should flow with this evolution – whatever speed and shape it takes – rather than trying to force revolution onto ourselves.
  
  
• Learning to live happily is a skill that can be taught and learned.
• It used to be an accepted fact that you are who you are ‘warts and all’ and you just got on with things as best you could. This is now known to be incorrect. Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that we have the power to be the person we want to be – obviously within our genetic predispositions. The wonderful news is that happiness is a skill that you can learn to create and use in your life.
  
  
• Death is not something to run away from or ignore.
• There is a need to work towards acceptance. There is only one thing that remains constant throughout life, and that is ‘change’. Our lives evolve across our lifespan, and if we live out our life expectancy, we will become old. This is not something to fear or ignore. BF Skinner, the founding father of Behavioural Psychology, examined this inevitable decline in the latter years of his own life and sensibly points out:
  
  
  
  This does not mean you should be morbid and constantly live your life as a slow inevitable decline towards death, but rather acknowledge that each breath you take, each step you take, each thing which unfolds in your adventure (good, bad or indifferent), is unique and never to be repeated in exactly the same way. Therefore, experience it all fully and to do this you need to be fully in the present moment as much as possible. This is true at any stage of your life. Treasure it and really live it!

  This is not easy, but it is certainly part of the adventure.

• Learn how to use Ego as a tool.
• This attitude is another tricky one to incorporate. You may not be aware of this, but all of us experience the world, and our lives, through filters. These filters are the result of our genetics, our upbringing, and experiences we have had in our lives. These things give us our biases, predispositions, suppositions, values and beliefs. These are the filters through which we experience our lives. We are 100% certain that we are correct in many of our experiences in life, but one of the most valuable lessons to learn is that we all experience life differently due to our filters. Some people have very similar filters to our own, but others have dramatically different filters. It is of these people and how they live their life, that we tend to say things like: ‘I just don’t understand why they do that’. A way of gaining this understanding is to remove our own filters and attempt to don the other person’s filters.
• So where does ego fit into all of this? Our ego is essentially our map of the world which allows us to successfully negotiate through and interact with everything that happens to us. This map is built up over the years of our life and serves us very well. It forms our ego – a strong sense of who we are, our self. However, ego can get in the way, particularly when it is being challenged by something that does not fit into its filtered way of seeing the world. Remember that the map serves us well, but it is still only a map, and what served us well in the past will not necessarily be appropriate for a future.
• So the recommendation in this attitude is to explore and understand ego and filters so that they can be used as a flexible tool to help you, rather than be a hindrance and a block.
  
  
• By changing yourself you change society.
• It is easy to complain about the state of the world, and point out how everyone else should be living their lives. This gains you two things usually:
  
  
  • A sour outlook – which is a surefire way of not enjoying your adventure!
  • A superior outlook – which will likely alienate you from people around you and will no doubt ensure your adventure quickly walls itself into a small area
    
    
• The only real way to effect change in the world, according to Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948) is to live it yourself:

  ‘You must be the change you wish to see in the world’

• Whether he is right or not could be debated. However, what a great invitation to an adventure; it puts you in control and empowers you to create. This is therefore a key attitude.
• The programme has been constructed from research and pieces of advice that have been collected from numerous sources, spanning many different disciplines and fields of interest. They represent a map of sorts to help you negotiate the adventure. As with any great exploration into unknown territory you may find that the map needs alteration and addition as you go along – but this advice provides at least a good start to get you going.